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 A Shattered Youth

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A Shattered Youth
Surviving the Khmer Rouge

Sathavy kim
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of
material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts have been
unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publishers
directly.

First published in French in 2008 as Jeunesse Brisée by Actes Sud.

This edition published in 2010 by Maverick House Publishers.

Maverick House Publishers, Office 19, Dunboyne Business Park,

Dunboyne, Co. Meath, Ireland.
info@maverickhouse.com
http://www.maverickhouse.com

ISBN: 978-1-905379-70-5

French language © Sathavy Kim/Actes Sud, 2008.

English language translation copyright © Mary Byrne, 2010.

The publisher acknowledges the financial assistance of Ireland Literature

Exchange (translation fund), Dublin, Ireland.
www.irelandliterature.com
info@irelandliterature.com

The paper used in this book comes from wood pulp of managed forests.
For every tree felled, at least one tree is planted, thereby renewing
natural resources.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means without written permission from the publisher, except
by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for insertion in a newspaper, magazine or broadcast.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
and the Irish Copyright libraries.
Photographs reproduced with kind permission of DCCam
(Documentation Centre of Cambodia)
 Contents
Acknowledgements 11
Preface 15
1: Return to the Light 25
2: En route to a Shattered Youth 32
3: Deportation, 17 April 1975 42
4: The Exodus Over, the Tragedy Begins 67
5: Pooling Everything 80
6: The Angkar ploughs the Land and Reaps its Living Souls 92
7: Khmer Costume in this New Theatre 116
8: Rabbit Droppings Cure All 128
9: Neither Mothers nor Wives, Women don’t exist anymore 135
10: Union by Couple under the Angkar 146
11: The Education of Children 155
12: The Sombre destiny of Buddhism
and the Khmer-Islam or cham minorities 161
13: Angkar Festivals and the
Mutilation of the Khmer language 169
14: The Big Works Projects of Democratic Kampuchea  177
15: The Destruction of Human Dignity 190
16: The Joy of Seeing my Family and Being Free Again 195
17: Return to the Village 211
18: 28 Years later 225
Glossary of Vocabulary used by the Khmer Rouge,
and everyday words 243
Overview of the Administrative Organisation
of Democratic Kampuchea in the Provinces 251
Bibliography 257
Constitution of Democratic Kampuchea;
5 January 1976 259
 Acknowledgements

A
Shattered Youth is the result of a labour that
has been buried within me for almost thirty
years. Digging it up was made possible by the
encouragement of my close friends and relatives.
My first thoughts are for Vanny, korngchalat survivor,
for her friendly and constant availability to talk with me
about our memories. Without my fortuitous meeting
with her in 2000, this story would have remained a family
document only.
My thanks also go to Marie, my colleague and faithful
friend, who, eleven years ago, encouraged me to make my
first pilgrimage to Phum Thmey. That visit allowed me to
resume contact with the villagers of Phum Thmey, and by
means of dialogue, to rediscover the traces of my youth.
My gratitude and affection also go to Ta Chourp and
Yeay Pheap, who took me in, to their children, and to the
villagers of Phum Thmey. I owe them all my life; they
supported me and warmed my heart during those four
black years without my family.
I wish to express my gratitude to the Cambodian
Documentation Centre, which gave me access to the

11
archived documents from this period and allowed me to
reproduce them.
I especially thank my husband Borng Do, for his affection,
advice, and constant support. This book wouldn’t have seen the
light of day without his constant presence. I wrote A Shattered
Youth by projecting myself into his eyes: putting his soul beside
mine made writing this personal narrative easier.
 Preface

Victory breeds hatred

The defeated live in pain
The peaceful live happily
Giving up both victory and defeat.
Buddha, Dhammapada, “Sukha Vagga”

M
y name is Sathavy and I am the eldest of seven
children. My father was a teacher but his real
passion was for the land, and from the time I
was small he taught me how to grow rice and traditional
crops, such as salad and tomatoes.
Ours was a very united family, and both my parents
were hard workers. They wanted to make sure my
siblings and I would one day go to college, in spite of
our provincial isolation. My mother was a seamstress
and worked ceaselessly because she couldn’t bear the
idea of any of us ever being in need. I spent much of
my childhood watching her work, and from an early age
it was clear to me that she dreamed of a better life for
my sisters and me. So, to prepare me for an improved
city life, I was sent to secondary school in Battambang,

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 S at h av y K i m

the second largest town in the kingdom, and then on to

Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city.
In 1975 the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, took
control of Phnom Penh by force and my family and I,
along with every other citizen of the city, were forced
to evacuate. What followed was four years of genocide
and unimaginable horror, which left over 1.7 million
of my people dead. Although we were undoubtedly
relieved when the Khmer Rouge were overthrown in
1979, during the ten years of Vietnamese occupation
that followed, we continued to live in constant fear of
being suspected of treason. Danger was still all around
us, and the countryside was riddled with Khmer Rouge
soldiers trying to regain control of the country. But no
matter how much the threat of danger remained, it was
still more bearable than the four years of oppression and
genocide we had just lived through. It was as if the Khmer
Rouge had completely desensitised us, and we no longer
recognised how appalling our circumstances still were.

In 1997 Hun Sen, leader of the Cambodian People’s

Party, overthrew Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh
in a bloody coup. I was forced to live through the same
scenes all over again: smoke in the sky, panic in the streets,
people fleeing their homes with only a small bundle
over their shoulders. I began to have vivid nightmares,
and night after night they invaded my sleep: the bloody
arbitrariness of the Khmer Rouge regime; being brutally
awoken at three in the morning to go to work; the fear

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 S h at t e r e d Yo u t h

of going down into the water in the paddy fields; being

hungry and exhausted; being scared they would take me
away; seeing soldiers take other people away with their
hands tied behind their backs.
I had been working as a judge for almost fifteen years,
when, in 1997, I was given an opportunity to spend a year
working and studying at a law school in The University
of Michigan in the United States. The coup took place
just a couple of days before I was due to leave and the
administration where I worked had doubts about letting
me go. They were afraid that if I left I wouldn’t come
back, but I decided the opportunity was too good to miss,
and I was glad of the chance to distance myself from the
country. My family was happy to let me go; an important
lesson we had learned from the Khmer Rouge regime was
that it was better to be separate than to stay together in
one place; if something happened, at least some of us
would be safe.
Two months after my arrival in Michigan, however,
I still couldn’t sleep at night and continued to have
nightmares. At the law school, I was asked to give a
presentation on the post-conflict situation in Cambodia
after the withdrawal of the Khmer Rouge. I was so moved
to tears during the presentation that I lost my voice. It
took me a long time to regain my composure after that
and for months afterwards I felt unsettled.
I was very fortunate, however, to have a job which gave
me opportunities to meet people from non-governmental
and humanitarian organisations. I found I liked being
around others and I sometimes told parts of my story

17
 S at h av y K i m

to friends and acquaintances. In my family too, we often

referred to our daily life under the Pol Pot regime. Talking
about the past in this way convinced me that things had
really changed, but it still wasn’t enough to free me of my
nightmares; they continued to rise to the top of my mind,
like fermenting bubbles in a glass of beer.
Some of my friends encouraged me to write about
my past, but I was so damaged by everything that
had happened that for a long time I couldn’t bear to
deliberately relive those experiences. I’d spent 20 years
trying to evade my past, but I began to realise that there
was a void in my life and I needed to fill it. I knew that
if I was ever to move on I would have to make a break
with those close friends who were now long dead, but
continued to haunt me. I began by filling in the blanks
in the history of my family, and in doing so I was able to
recollect my stolen life.
With the support and encouragement of my husband
Borng Do, I went back to the places where I had been
held. I made several trips to the village of Phum Thmey
to see the family who’d been my safe haven under the
Khmer Rouge regime, and I even met the leaders and
members of the labour camp where I was forced to work.
I visited places that still bear the scars of the atrocities
committed there, and by naming them I hope to help
heal the wounds that still remain.

My story is a genuine personal account, and one that

could have been told by thousands of other women who

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 S h at t e r e d Yo u t h

are no longer here to tell it for themselves. My intention,

therefore, in writing this book was to move beyond
the idea of a personal chronicle. Instead of merely
documenting my own life, I wanted to document the
daily reality experienced by so many women during those
three years, eight months and twenty days we lived under
the Khmer Rouge regime. I spent most of that time in the
korngchalat, a forced-labour camp in Kampong Cham,
the province most completely permeated by the influence
of the Khmer Rouge.
Working in the labour camp became our domestic
reality, and we spent each day in submission. We were
forced to work as prisoners, and to search each day for
water and food. We were obliged to sit through criticism
sessions each evening, and every minute of our lives was
spent in the repression of our identities, our religious
traditions, and all our cultural references.
In our daily life in this open air prison, the aspirations
of the Angkar, the political organisation behind the
Khmer Rouge, began to appear little by little. Although
a distant and removed institution, the korngchalat
acted as a constant reinforcement of the most radical
of the Angkar’s philosophies and procedures, and went
completely against everything human dignity demanded.
Later we learned that the final objective of the Angkar
was to create a “New” being, one who was totally subject
to the concentration-camp system and possessed no
sense of individuality.
My personal journey is, therefore, also a social
chronicle and a testimony to the substance of Khmer

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 S at h av y K i m

women, who, to their great honour, managed to retain

their humanity even throughout those dark years. This
book is a homage to the great majority of them, who
courageously defended their dignity, even to the death.
It is also a homage to those female survivors who, after
the fall of Pol Pot and his regime, were the first to give
back meaning to our existence by rebuilding the family
unit, and weaving a social network around our national
identity.
This book is organised according to the rhythms of the
universe of female korngchalat workers, furnishing their
labour to the Angkar without limit, and often without
purpose. It is also punctuated by chronological stages in
the concentration-camp system until it collapsed in early
1979. A glossary completes this account, with a translation
of all the words in the Khmer language which were used
frequently during that period, and their specific meaning
inside the system to which we were subjected. The Khmer
language, which is rich in ancient sources such as Pali
and Sanskrit, is a language of refined subtleties, of tales
and legends. But it had become an instrument of combat.
To support the domination to which we were subjected,
each word was carefully weighed up to best measure the
gravity of an order or situation. I felt it was useful to
give this permanent linguistic reference, not only as an
indication of the violence of the words themselves under
Khmer Rouge ideology, but also to highlight the Khmer
language of today, which still carries its traditions within
it—as well as the red brand of violence.

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 S h at t e r e d Yo u t h

This is the story of how I, and Cambodia’s women,

struggled to survive under the Khmer Rouge.

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